Heda Kovaly

Heda Kovaly, who died on December 5 aged 91, was a Czechoslovakian Jew who
survived the concentration camps and then the horrors of Stalin’s reign of
terror and later wrote a moving memoir, Under a Cruel Star (1986, published
in Britain in 1988 as Prague Farewell), a personal story of survival against
the odds.

6:44PM GMT 09 Dec 2010

She was born Heda Bloch on September 15 1919 in Prague, where her father was a works manager and financial officer with Waldes Koh-i-Noor, a manufacturer of dress fasteners. In October 1941, after the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Heda, her family and her new husband, Rudolf Margolius, were deported to the Lodz ghetto in Poland.

Heda Kovaly

In her memoir she recalled the scene as thousands of Jews were herded into the Exposition Hall in Prague for deportation: a Mrs Tausig who goes completely crazy and throws her false teeth at a German guard; children crying incessantly; a little fat man playing the same passage from Beethoven’s Concerto in D major on the violin over and over; and a philosophy professor, dapper in his homburg, who reads to her from the classics.

Weeks later, assisting a doctor on his rounds through the ghetto, she recalled finding a dead man, “his body swarming with a myriad of fat white lice. They also crawled over the face of the Venus de Milo, who smiled serenely from a page of the open book on the man’s chest. The book had dropped from his hand as he lay dying. I leaned over him. It was my professor.”

In August 1944, after some 100,000 people had been murdered or had died of starvation in the ghetto, the survivors were transported to Auschwitz. On arrival at the camp, Heda was chosen to live and was subsequently sent to work as a forced labourer in the Christianstadt labour camp. Her parents were sent immediately to the gas chambers.

As Russian forces approached in early 1945 the camp was evacuated, and Heda joined a column of women prisoners en route to Bergen-Belsen. During the journey, however, she managed to escape and made her way back to Prague, a city nervously awaiting the arrival of their Red Army “liberators”. Hopes that she would find a welcome were soon dashed, however. Arriving at the home of a friend who had promised to be “an anchor” for all those deported, she was greeted with the words: “For God’s sake, what brings you here?”

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After the end of the war, when she ventured into the countryside to visit her family’s former home, the farmer who had been allocated her confiscated property closed the door on her with the words: “So you’ve come back? Oh no. That’s all we’ve needed.”

Eventually she was reunited with her husband, who had survived both Auschwitz and Dachau. They had a son, and in the immediate postwar years she watched as her husband and many others turned to communism “not so much in revolt against the existing political system, but out of sheer despair over human nature, which showed itself at its very worst after the war”. Though she joined the party, she remained sceptical of a creed which offered “such clear, simple answers to the most complex questions”. She also observed how some of the worst elements under the Nazis became ardent communists after 1948.

After studying economics and working for an organisation to rebuild Czechoslovakia’s postwar industry, Heda’s husband was offered a post in the Ministry of Foreign Trade after the Communists assumed power in 1948. He rose to become a deputy minister of foreign trade under President Klement Gottwald.

But during the Stalinist purges in eastern Europe, life became increasingly dangerous. People began to disappear, and a friend took Heda out in his rowing boat into the middle of a lake to warn her that if her husband remained in his job “he’s done for, that’s for sure” . But her husband refused to believe he might be in danger.

One day, early in 1952, he failed to come home from work. Instead, five men arrived at Heda’s door in the middle of the night to deliver his briefcase. The next time she saw him, 11 months later, was the last. It was December 2 1952, on the eve of his execution; he was one of 11 Jewish officials convicted, after false confessions extracted by torture, of “anti-state conspiracy” following one of the era’s most notorious show trials.

She later learned that her husband had been hanged and his body cremated and given to security officials for disposal. In a final indignity, a few miles out of Prague, the officials’ limousine began to skid on the icy road and Rudolf Margolius’s ashes were thrown under the wheels for traction.

After his death Heda and her four-year-old son, Ivan, found themselves hounded by the secret police and shunned by former friends. Denied employment and thrown out of her apartment, she eked a living doing translations under assumed names. In 1955 she married Pavel Kovaly, a philosophy lecturer, and under his name translated German, British and American fiction into Czech, eventually becoming recognised as one of the country’s leading literary translators.

After Rudolf Margolius was officially, though secretly, rehabilitated in 1963, she was invited to the Ministry of Justice to fill in a form reporting losses sustained as a result of his arrest and execution. Her list included “loss of honour,” “loss of health” and “loss of faith in the Party and in justice”. Only at the end did she write “loss of property”. But her efforts to persuade the authorities to exonerate him publicly fell on deaf ears.

In 1968, when Red Army troops invaded Prague, Heda feigned a holiday trip and, with only two small suitcases and $20 in hand, fled Czechoslovakia: “The last thing I saw was a Russian soldier, standing guard with a fixed bayonet.”

Her son had already escaped to begin a new life in Britain, and her husband was on a lecture tour in the United States. Together they settled in Boston, where he taught at Northeastern University while she found work as a librarian at the Harvard University Law School. In 1996 the couple returned to Prague, where Pavel Kovaly died in 2006.

Under a Cruel Star was first published in Czech in 1973 and was revised and republished in English in a translation by Helen Epstein with the author. Despite its harrowing subject matter, Heda Kovaly recorded only what she had witnessed. So there was no mention in the book of her brother, who was captured by the Germans and never heard from again.

But the book was not uniformly bleak. It opened with these words: “Three forces carved the landscape of my life. Two of them crushed half the world. The third was a shy little bird in my rib cage an inch or two below my stomach. Sometimes in the most unexpected moments the bird would wake up, lift its head, and flutter its wing in rapture. Then I too would lift my head because, for that short moment, I would know for certain that love and hope are infinitely more powerful than hate and fury, and that somewhere beyond the line of my horizon there was life indestructible, always triumphant.”

A little, sparrow-like woman who had been a beauty in her youth, Heda Kovaly retained the enthusiasm of youth and remained well-coiffed and neatly dressed into old age.

She is survived by her son, the architect and author Ivan Margolius, who lives in London.